Monica Gaines lives in Wayne County, MI with her husband Nathaniel and their son Nate. She began her journey into home visiting in 2013 when she joined the Healthy Families program in Wayne County. She became a parent leader in 2015 when she joined the advisory board and the Local Leadership Group. She went on to also join the State Local Leadership Parent Leader Team. In 2017, Monica was hired as the Healthy Families Program senior program assistant and most recently has also taken on the role of parent coordinator with the Early Childhood Investment Corporation.
This blog describes the urgent need for early childhood and child welfare to join forces to support vulnerable children and outlines the goals of a BUILD project to create a strategy to develop and enhance the collaboration between the child welfare and early childhood systems to improve outcomes for young children and their families.
These resources are from the fifth webinar of the Child Welfare and Early Childhood: Cross-Systems Collaboration to Improve Outcomes for Young Children and Their Families series.
This case study describes Michigan’s parent leadership program model, one that was 30 years in the making. The model, a concept tested over the last eight years, can be replicated within any early childhood system or program.
The BUILD Initiative is thrilled to welcome Monique Fountain Hanna, MD, MPH, MBA, to our staff as Interim Director of State Services. Monique has over 23 years of experience transforming public health systems; driving health equity; overseeing the development of infant, maternal, and child health-serving systems; and advancing quality standards across the country.
Roxana Linares, executive director of Centro Tyrone Guzman, the largest and oldest multi-service Latine organization in Minneapolis, Minnesota, contributed to this blog on the center’s insistence on embracing family and community voice.
